Audio Review 11: Hornets' Nest - 5. Hive of Horror, written by Paul Magrs (2009)

Released: December 2009

Cast:

The Doctor – Tom Baker
Mike Yates – Richard Franklin
Mrs Wibbsey – Susan Jameson
Queen of the Swarm – Rula Lenska


Main Production Credits

Producer and Director – Kate Thomas
Writer – Paul Magrs
Script Editor & Executive Producer – Michael Stevens
Incidental Music – Simon Power
Audio Editor – Neil Gardner
Production Assistant – Lyndsey Melling
Studio Engineers – Simon Willey & Wolfgang Deinst


Story Summary (SPOILERS!):

The Doctor, Mike Yates and Mrs Wibbsey, with the help of the Hornets’ ballet shoes, and the TARDIS’ dimensional stabiliser, miniaturise themselves so they can penetrate the nest of the Hornet hive mind. Upon discovering it inside the head of a stuffed Zebra, they confront the Queen of the Hornet Swarm. The Doctor and Mrs Wibbsey are incarcerated, while the Hornet Queen brainwashes Mike Yates, and poisons his mind against the Doctor.

The Doctor and Mrs Wibbsey escape their paper prison by starting a fire. In the panic, they restore Mike Yates to his normal self and use his acquired knowledge of the Hive to set a trap for the Hornet Queen, using the royal jelly of the Hornets as bait. The Queen is successfully tricked into the trap, the Doctor using the latent power in the Hornets’ ballet shoes to miniaturise the Queen to a microscopic size, wiping out the influence of her mind control of the other Hornets’, who are now reduced to being normal insects. The Doctor, Mike Yates and Mrs Wibbsey escape the burning Hive in the nick of time, and restore themselves back to normal size. The surviving Hornets are dropped off in a distant galaxy, away from harm.


Story Placement

Between Hornets’ Nest: A Sting in the Tale (BBC Audio) and the Demon Quest audio series (BBC audio).

Review:

After four enjoyable tales in the past and some very intriguing build up, Hive of Horror feels like something of an anti-climax in the Hornet’s Nest audio series. As concluding instalments go, it does its job, resolving the overall story arc and showing the Doctor defeating the alien Hornet creatures, but it fails to deliver the meaty, substantial and satisfying narrative that the Hornets’ Nest series needed in order to make it all feel worthwhile.

To Paul Magrs’ credit though, he does create some new and original material to keep loyal listeners interested in the general proceedings. Setting the adventure inside the Hornets’ nest itself, for instance, is inspired, giving a real sense of the Doctor confronting the enemy inside the ‘lion’s den’. Although, in a way, the nest was the only place left where the stakes would feel considerably higher, considering the various times and places this series has taken listeners. Even on audio, thanks to Magrs’ superlative descriptions in the narration, the hive is a fascinating, and very alien labyrinth that feels both claustrophobic and unsettling in equal measure. The fact that the Hornets are much bigger in size than the Doctor and co, relatively speaking, makes their threat much more convincing than in their previous audio appearances. Experiencing the Doctor confront the Hornet Queen in her “throne room” also has distinct echoes of The Parting of the Ways and Planet of the Spiders about it, as the Doctor faces down his powerful, and more imposing foe.

Paul Magrs also takes time in the script to give Mike Yates some well deserved character development. Although the last series of Jon Pertwee’s era in Doctor Who gave Captain Yates substantial character development, sadly more than was ever given to the Brigadier during the TV series, the character of Mike Yates during Hornets’ Nest is significantly older, so it’s only right that the series takes the time to explore that. The Hornet Queen uncovers Yates’ resentment at being a has-been, who has never received any credit for his loyal service, while the Doctor seems to take all the credit, and is free to be care free, and nearly forever young. At this point, it’s interesting to note that the Doctor’s companion for Hornet’s Nest was originally meant to be Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, but was only changed when Nicholas Courtney was too ill to take part. However, its point of interest in my view is how well Yates’ character development could also be equally applicable to the Brigadier. In fact we can already hear a bitter and resentful version of the Brigadier in BIG Finish’s Doctor Who Unbound audio, Sympathy for the Devil, so the idea isn’t hard to imagine. In fact, I can’t help thinking it would’ve been better had the Brigadier been in Hornets’ Nest instead of Mike Yates, but I shouldn’t dwell on the ‘what if’, particularly as it’s not fair on Richard Franklin and the character of Yates, who have both been some of the highlights of this audio series.

Mike Yates aside, the rest of the characters suffer from little development, which is a shame, considering the smaller cast gives them all a better chance to breathe and take a bigger part of centre stage. The Doctor is probably the only exception, not needing further development at this stage, remaining the fun and enjoyable eccentric that we always love, and has a humbling unstinting faith in his old friend Mike Yates, which makes a nice change to the slight cold indifference the 4th Doctor seemed to feel for some of his companions on television. Mrs Wibbsey, on the other hand, is sadly, in my opinion, one of the most annoying companions in the history of Doctor Who (well she’s practically one now, and she certainly will be in the two subsequent two audio series, Demon Quest and Serpent Crest). I was unsure how I felt about her during The Stuff of Nightmares as there wasn’t much to go on. Throughout the earlier instalments, I withheld any judgement as I wanted to see if the character genuinely amounted to anything by the end of the audio series, but sadly she remained a fairly one-dimensional character to the end. Mrs Wibbsey seems to just endlessly grumble, complain and exclaim at various points throughout the story, like an old-age British pensioner version of Tegan, only without any real character development apart from being whisked away by the Doctor at the end of The Dead Shoes. When she’s not moaning, Mrs Wibbsey occupies the role of a stereotypical housekeeper, often quite stern and proper, but also quietly proud and attentive. This of course, isn’t irritating, but it remains just as inconsequential and irrelevant as her more prevalent complaining aspect, as her character has no impact or effect on either the narrative or the plot. Furthermore, the distinct lack of originality and development in Mrs Wibbsey makes it hard to care about or take interest in the character.

One of the real disappointments in Hive of Horror though, is the poor characterisation of the Hornet Queen. After the short contact between the Doctor and the Hornets in A Sting in the Tale, the finale of the Hornets’ Nest series needed a memorable face-off and a memorable villain to help develop, expand and round off an enemy that had previously been rather circumspect and thin on character. To start off with, the Queen cautiously pokes at her humanoid foes in order to learn about them, and tries to hypnotically seduce Yates with sweet nothings, but sadly when any real character is called for, the Queen of the Hornets is just as pantomime as the Hornets’ previous human orators.

Hive of Horror’s main failing though, is having too small a story, not in scale, but in duration. There’s only enough plot for half the story’s running time, and the resolution itself is so basic, that there’s no real tension or build-up to keep the audience interested. After having got over the image of the Hornets’ maze-like hive, the only real interesting aspect of the story is when it seems as if Mike Yates might have been successfully turned by the Hornet Queen. Any other moment or sense of danger is quickly swept away in a couple of sentences spoken in the narration. There’s also a large amount of padding in the script. Although Paul Magrs seems to slightly overdo the amount of description in his brilliant narration, a lot of time is simply taken up by the Doctor wandering or hanging around inside the nest without doing very much in particular. There’s also a lot of dialogue passages (not narration) where one of the characters rather irritatingly explains or debates at length what they think will happen next, before we actually hear it happen for ourselves, thus taking away any sense of tension or enjoyment that could have been gained from those events, making the story thoroughly predictable to the listener. The resolution is probably the worst affected by this, as its simplicity feels somewhat mundane, and possibly a slight cop-out too as a resolution to the whole Hornets’ Nest series.

Fortunately, we again have a strong cast to help entertain the loyal listener. Tom Baker is now perfectly settled back into his role as the 4th Doctor, and his wonderfully eccentric performance makes his every line of dialogue an audible delight. Thankfully Mike Yates has at last been allowed to play a more central part in this story than in previous audios, and Richard Franklin delivers in spades, happy to have more substantial material to get his teeth into. Susan Jameson tries her best, but struggles to shine with such a tiresome character. Rula Lenska, also has some overly theatrical and tiresome dialogue to cope with, but manages to give the Hornet Queen a brilliantly silky malevolence in her more subdued and quieter scenes.

Overall, the Hive of Horror is an entertaining finale to an entertaining series, but its faults are also symptomatic of those that can be found in the rest of the Hornets’ Nest audio series. One or two-dimensional characters, theatrical dialogue, padding, and simplistic insubstantial conclusions have blighted most of the audios in the series, balanced out by gloriously beautiful narrative descriptions by Paul Magrs, great cast performances and some quite imaginative ideas, sometimes creepy, sometimes wacky and outlandish. Tom Baker is undoubtedly the star of the series, successfully bringing back a character performance that made him the universally loved and revered actor he is to this day. It took a while for him to gradually feel his way back into the character, but it was more than worth the wait.

If BBC Audio can work up wonders with Tom Baker on decent audio efforts, just imagine the audio gold BIG Finish could achieve with this great man!

Hive of Horror Score: 6/10

Overall Hornets’ Nest Score: 7/10

Book Review 5: The Eight Doctors, written by Terrance Dicks (1997)

Released: June 1997

Story Summary (BIG SPOILERS!):

The recently-regenerated 8th Doctor is taken unawares by a trap laid by the recently-deceased Master, which results in him completely losing his memory and identity. Encouraged by the mysterious voice of long-dead Time Lord ruler, Lord Rassilon, the Doctor pilots the TARDIS to visit each of his previous selves in the hope that he can reclaim his memory and return to normal. On the way he gives words of wisdom to his earlier selves, helps them defeat old foes, saves some of them from danger, meets some old friends, and even helps to save Gallifrey from a political crisis of its own making.

The Doctor also accidentally arrives back at Coal Hill, only in 1997, where he meets young student Sam Jones, who is in danger from a particularly vicious bully and drug dealer called Baz. Once the Doctor recovers all his memory, he returns to save Sam from trouble before he moves on. Sam decides to join the newly restored Doctor in his travels, and depart to experience new adventures in space and time.


Story Placement

Between The TV Movie (TV Serial) and Vampire Science (BBC Book).

(1st Doctor: During An Unearthly Child; 2nd Doctor: During The War Games; 3rd Doctor: Immediately after The Sea Devils; 4th Doctor: Immediately after State of Decay; 5th Doctor: Immediately after The Five Doctors; 6th Doctor: During Parts 13-14 of The Trial of a Time Lord; 7th Doctor: Probably concurrent to The Room with No Doors (Virgin New Adventures book), and after Bullet Time (BBC Book PDA) as this has to take place before Lungbarrow (Virgin New Adventures book) during which the TARDIS interior is altered.)


Review:

It was a new Doctor, and the beginning of the BBC’s first official Doctor Who book range, and yet at times The Eight Doctors just beggars belief. Now, it goes without saying that Terrance Dicks has written some fantastic Doctor Who, both in print as well as more obviously for the Television show itself, but sadly this book isn’t one of them.

Perhaps what is most striking about it is how bizarre Terrance Dicks’ logic is in writing such a story. His invented storyline for The Eight Doctors, isn’t odd in itself, in fact it recalls his own story The Five Doctors, and his celebrated writing style from his Target novelisations. However, the idea that you introduce new people to Doctor Who by writing a novel filled with enough TV episode-specific continuity to fill a mini-encyclopaedia, and then try to introduce a new Doctor in print by instead introducing all the previous (and probably better-known) Doctors and their respective characters is surely bordering on madness. Terrance Dicks enables this multi-Doctor extravaganza by contriving a rather trite trap laid by the recently deceased Master, after somewhat openly (and hypocritically) criticising some of the TV Movie’s contrived events. Furthermore, as this story has to serve as an introduction for a new companion, Sam Jones, Dicks also reluctantly contrives an accidental visit by the 8th Doctor to Totter’s Lane and London’s fictional Coal Hill region (maybe in Shoreditch possibly) in 1997 as first seen in the first TV episode, An Unearthly Child.

Even if we ignore the story’s crazy and frankly, messy development though, Terrance Dicks shoots himself in the foot by writing rather poor characterisation for the majority of the book. The new and ‘current’ 8th Doctor suffers the most, becoming amnesic yet again, and rather too soon in light of his immediately preceding regeneration and opening story, the TV Movie. Far more criminal though is the fact that Terrance Dicks writes him as the blandest and most generic Doctor ever, not even offering hints of possible character development. The brief character aspects he is given are one-dimensional, often gimmicky attributes which are only there to help him through the plot at convenient moments, like regaining his talent at Venusian Aikido, being able to drink several tankards of beer, or effortlessly taking up the role of a diplomatic politician. In fact Terrance Dicks seems to have tried to extrapolate a character for the 8th Doctor, purely from the fact that he’s somewhat dashing – the main cliché of the 8th Doctor taken from the TV Movie. Thankfully future books in the series would repair the damage done here and do a much better take on the 8th Doctor, taking him into various interesting areas.

Another big failure is in the characterisation of the past Doctors as well, which is also rather odd, considering that Terrance Dicks has had more experience writing most of them, than most other writers at this point. Only the 1st, 3rd and 5th Doctors actually resemble their TV personas, and even then, there seem to be discrepancies. The 3rd Doctor, rather incongruously threatens to kill his future self in order to escape back into Time and Space, and he really means it, which feels so out of character, you have to wonder if Terrance has done any research or is just falling back on the distorted memory of when he used to write the character for television. The 2nd Doctor is rather grumpy, the 4th is also quite generic, and the 7th is just a manic depressive (yes he did have bouts of depression now and again, but there’s a very lot more to him than that!). The worst past-Doctor characterisation though has to be the 6th Doctor, who is written by Terrance as always egotistical, gets angry a lot, and mainly wants to eat a lot. As characterisations go it’s scandalous. Outside the use of season 22 clichés, the fact that Terrance Dicks uses his portrayal of the sixth Doctor as a mean slur against Colin Baker just for being a bit overweight, is not only in bad taste, but also cruel (and hypocritical again – has Terrance looked in the mirror recently). The rest of the characters are very simplistic, occasionally bland, and usually full of clichés abound, including sadly, the new companion Sam Jones. From these weak beginnings, her character would struggle to have much impact on the BBC Book range, aside from Lawrence Miles’ Time-twisting tales, but that’s still to come.

As the 8th Doctor has lost his memory, the plot mainly consists of revisiting the Doctor’s past incarnations, so he can regain his memory bit-by-bit from each one of his past selves. Instead of 7 new and original short stories, Terrance Dicks overall decides to return back to old Doctor Who TV serials, three of which he originally wrote (The War Games, State of Decay and The Five Doctors), and one of which he wrote up as a novelisation (An Unearthly Child). Unfortunately, this method works more against him than for him. The 1st and 2nd Doctor segments are a shameless revision of some of the best script work in the programme. Here the 8th Doctor talks the 1st into being more kind, compassionate and selfless, and talks the 2nd into giving himself up to the Time Lords, which I feel cheapens some of the great writing in An Unearthly Child and The War Games, as well as the journeys those Doctors have to go through as characters. Thankfully Terrance Dicks chooses a much better tack for later stories that act as codas to the TV serials they relate to rather than direct intervention in them. The 3rd Doctor segment sees the Master on the run to his TARDIS immediately after The Sea Devils; the next shows the 4th Doctor and Romana encountering another hidden nest of Vampires after State of Decay; and in the 5th Doctor segment, the 8th Doctor visits his previous self back in the Eye of Orion, trying a second attempt at relaxation after the resolution of The Five Doctors, and being ambushed by some past monsters.

The sixth mini adventure is the best of these, where the 8th Doctor goes back to Gallifrey at the time of the last episodes of The Trial of a Time Lord, to help reveal the truth and scandal of it to his fellow Time Lords, expose the corrupted Time Lords at its heart and help restore Gallifreyan society and politics to a more democratic, organised and morally virtuous position. This is probably the first time in the book where the 8th Doctor has a real positive impact on story events, and stops being a walking, talking plot device, even if it doesn’t last for long. Terrance also gets the opportunity to correct a couple of small problems and fill in and elaborate on a few plot developments from The Trial of a Time Lord that went unexplained previously. In fact it’s probably the first and only time Terrance’s continuity feast does anything useful in the book. The 7th story segment is by comparison the weakest, showing the 7th Doctor revisiting Metebelis III on a whim and getting caught off-guard by a giant spider that survived the events of Planet of the Spiders. The 8th Doctor turns up in the nick to save his former self with a flash of the Master’s Tissue Compression Eliminator, which he conveniently picked up during the third mini adventure.

Terrance Dicks also brings back a host of old Time Lord characters for a couple of Gallifrey subplots. The first involves President Flavia monitoring the 8th Doctor’s odd revisits to his past incarnations from a far, aided by Castellan Spandrell, and the activities of disgruntled and ruthless Time Lord Ryoth, who tries to kill the 8th Doctor by sending a Raston Warrior Robot, Sontarans and a Drashig to the 5th Doctor in the Eye of Orion. The second involves the corrupt President Niroc, who oversaw the Ravalox/Earth atrocity as seen in The Trial of a Time Lord, and deposed Flavia after the events of The Five Doctors, being exposed by the 8th Doctor, who with the help of a temporarily revived Borusa, deposes him to elect a new High Council and correct the events of the Ravalox affair. Even Rassilon seems to play a large part in the story, conveniently aiding the Doctor to pilot the TARDIS back to see his former selves while still in his amnesic state, and seemly manipulating his meeting with Sam Jones. All this wallowing in Doctor Who’s past does produce a nice cosy blanket of nostalgia, but even by Terrance Dick’s past efforts, this feels particularly excessive. Digging up Flavia for the 6th Doctor’s segment is fair enough (although bringing back Borusa is dubious), but using her to represent Gallifrey in the ‘present’, shows up Terrance’s reluctance to do anything other than just be stuck in the past, completely ignoring the imaginative, legitimate and genuine developments in the story of the Time Lords as written in the Missing and New Adventures book ranges published by Virgin throughout the 1990s. Terrance Dicks even brings back the cheetah-infected Master to help explain the Master’s remains at the beginning of the TV Movie, which also completely ignores a lot of what the New Adventures did with the character.

And yet despite all these faults, The Eight Doctors is very readable. It may not challenge the grey cells very much, if at all, but it’s certainly a fun and pleasant read if nothing else. Like I mentioned at the start of the review, the book puts you in mind of the Target novelisations Terrance Dicks used to write so well. The Eight Doctors may sadly not be up to the same standards as most of those novelisations, with a contrived story, made up of short stories that are tacked on to the end of old narratives, often written rather generically and lacking character, feeling like padding, and with convenient plot devices at every turn. However, most of the stories are decent and entertaining tales that are far from being dull and empty passages of no consequence. The third, fifth and sixth Doctor segments in particular, are very entertaining tales that perfectly put the reader in mind of the period of Doctor Who that inspired them. Although, it’s hard to tell if Terrance Dicks is just lazily sticking to what he knows, because he doesn’t really want to write the novel, or is merely taking up a chance to once again relieve the glory days and pass comment on the general production history of Doctor Who up to this point. And there lies my main issue with the book. The Eight Doctors is a nice warm slice of cosy Doctor Who nostalgia, but it could have been so much more.

Score: 6/10

Audio Review 10: Hornets' Nest - 4. A Sting in the Tale, written by Paul Magrs (2009)

Released: December 2009

Cast:

The Doctor – Tom Baker
Mike Yates – Richard Franklin
Sister – Susie Riddell
Nun – Clare Corbett
Mrs Wibbsey – Susan Jameson
The Swarm – Rula Lenska

Main Production Credits

Producer and Director – Kate Thomas

Writer – Paul Magrs
Script Editor & Executive Producer – Michael Stevens
Incidental Music – Simon Power
Audio Editor – Neil Gardner
Production Assistant – Lyndsey Melling
Studio Engineers – Simon Willey & Wolfgang Deinst

Story Summary (SPOILERS!):

The Doctor tells Mike Yates of how he tracked down the alien Hornets back to medieval Northumberland, where a Priory of Nuns are under attack from a pack of wild dogs. The Doctor discovers that within the Priory walls, the Nuns guard a Pig, whom they are convinced to be their mother superior. The Pig, in fact, holds the Queen of the Hornets and the wild dogs are possessed by the Hornet workers trying to reclaim her and unite the hive mind. After the Dogs penetrate the Priory and discover the Queen, the Hornets all unite into a collective mind inside one of the dogs, which the Doctor lures back to the TARDIS, to save the Priory.

However, once inside the TARDIS, the Doctor and the Hornets chase each other, in a deadly game of cat and mouse, until the Hornets take their chance to invade the Doctor himself! Powerless, the Doctor is forced to pilot the Hornets back to Earth, whereupon they escape into 18th Century Venice, taking over the young dwarf Antonio along the way.

Story Placement

Between Hornets’ Nest: The Circus of Doom (BBC Audio) and Hornets’ Nest: Hive of Horror (BBC Audio).

Review:

A Sting in the Tale is a successful culmination in the ongoing story of the Hornets’ Nest audio series. We finally learn the whole truth about the mysterious alien hornet creatures, and can at last fully appreciate the status quo between the hornets and the Doctor before their future battle back in the present day takes place. Sadly, partly because of the brilliant plot twist revealed in The Circus of Doom, there is little in the way of surprises in this adventure as the audience will already know that the TARDIS was to be invaded by the hornets, and that they would eventually end up in 18th Century Venice. Despite the overall predictability to the plot though, there is still a fair amount to offer to the loyal listener.

For a start, there’s the greatly atmospheric and romantic setting of a Medieval Priory in Northumberland. Thanks to Paul Magrs’ great narrative passages, it’s easy to imagine the bitterly cold rural landscape, and the Doctor walking on the crisp, thick snow. The medieval scene is also well established and maintained, as the Doctor has to endure barley soup with “rancid” butter while in the barren and claustrophobic stone walls of the Priory.  We also have hornet-possessed animals once again, only this time live and not stuffed. Furthermore they’re used and written much more effectively than in previous Hornets’ Nest audios. We have a bemused Pig, who rather bizarrely and somewhat implausibly is mistaken, and dressed, as a mother superior by the other nuns in the Priory. Rather more threatening are the rabid and ferocious wild dogs that attack and invade the Priory as the Hornets try to reclaim their Queen from the resident Pig. The image of wolf-like dogs stampeding through a medieval stone priory is absolutely picturesque and slightly unnerving. Had this been made for TV, I have no doubt that it would be quite a chilling and impressive sight.

The story’s growing dynamism continues as inevitably the Doctor leads the last Hornet-invested hound away into the TARDIS, and runs around various imaginative made-up rooms. However from that point on, the audio becomes rather more mundane and predictable. The myriad of TARDIS rooms are interesting at first, but after a while the continuing run-a-round just becomes tiresome padding as it has done in many other adventures that feature a lot of the TARDIS. The takeover of the Doctor by the Hornets though, does raise the stakes of the story arc significantly, as its interesting to see the Doctor genuinely out of his depth, even if it doesn’t last long. Also, as previously mentioned, we already know that the TARDIS has to land in the lagoons of 18th century Venice, so loyal listeners spend the last third of the audio just waiting for the inevitable events mentioned in The Circus of Doom to play out. It seems as if the real adventure is yet to come.

The other real disappointment in the audio is the true nature of the Hornet creatures themselves. Apparently, they only came to Earth by chance, and that apart from possession and self-miniaturisation, it seems as if most of the magical powers listeners have witnessed them make use of in previous audios (hypnotism, mind reading, manipulating human emotions, animating still objects) have appeared from nowhere, without explanation. It feels like a bit of a cop-out that so many of these powers, in some cases integral to the plots of previous adventures, like the animated ballet shoes, were just contrived to make the story possible, and that’s even without mentioning all the many convenient coincidences throughout the Hornets’ Nest series.

On a more positive note, Tom Baker is still on good form, particularly on the narration, which you can tell he really loves reading, such is his infectious enthusiasm. The rest of the cast is quite minimal and play much smaller parts on this occasion, although I did notice that one of the Nuns (if there was more than one) had some trouble with their northern accent. The sound design on the alien Hornet voice was really good too. I didn’t even recognise that it was played by Rula Lenska when I listened the first time around! Simon Power’s music has also clearly been steadily improving since The Stuff of Nightmares too. Some of it sounds positively Dudley Simpson-esque. Although it’s still disappointing that the music just consists of a small selection of repeatedly used cues. Maybe the music budget is rather tight on BBC audios. BIG Finish seems to manage well enough.

So A Sting in the Tale mainly consists of a rounding up and summary of all the plot threads in the Hornets’ Nest series so far. The first third is a short atmospheric adventure into medieval Britain that is really well-written, but as soon as the action moves to the TARDIS the story seems to stop in its tracks and begins to wind down just as it was getting exciting. Despite a short burst of tension when the Doctor is momentarily taken over by the Hornets, the last half of the audio is an exercise in padding and summing up, which is a big shame, because it seemed that A Sting in the Tale had the potential to be the best in the series so far.

Score: 8/10